On the Trail

Visiting the Imperial City inside the walled Citadel in the city of Hue.  Vietnam was a monarchy from 1805-1945, and the Imperial City of Hue was the capital and home of the 13 emperors of the Nguyen dynasty.

Screenshots and pics of my stops along the journey…

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Ho Chi Minh City or bust!

Vietnam is one of the largest growers of rice in the world.  I got to see the rice-growing process from the flooding of the paddies…

…to the harvest!  After the rice is harvested, it is spread out to dry on flat surfaces – in front of homes, even on the shoulders of the national highway!

Scenes from the rice paddies – leveling with water buffalo, weeding, and homemade tractor wheels.

200 miles south of Hanoi, we got lost!  We’re not using Google Maps or Siri or anything like that out here, folks – just an old-fashioned paper map and Mr. Sun.  Some locals helped us with directions, which was difficult with the language barrier.  Our little turnaround totaled 57 extra miles on the bikes!

Looks like the Vietnamese will be fed for a lifetime…they have this fishing thing figured out for sure!

Danny and I took a little detour to the South China Sea and crashed a beach party…all in a day’s work!  It was so much fun, we’ve made a couple more stops in the past few days.

As a cycling enthusiast, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for bikes on my journey.  Here are some I’ve come across in Vietnam!

When I checked out of my hotel room the other day, I had planned to give the hotel a credit card, but they told me that they would only accept Vietnamese money, called dong.  So I spent all the dong that I had on the hotel room and couldn’t get any more before we left town.  We stopped to get water, and I realized that I only had dollars.  When I asked the shopkeeper if he would take that, he said no!  After some negotiations, he finally took my dollars.  Then I tried to get dong at a gas station, but the guy was going to gouge me!  Finally, after several tense minutes, we found a bank and all was well.  Why was this so critical?  No dong = can’t buy water = WE WILL DIE!

More accurately, a good old-fashioned Vietnamese goat roast!

I braved the traffic-filled streets of Hanoi again, this time on my bike!  There is no such thing as right of way, there are few lines on the streets, and there are nonstop horns…but soothing stoplight music helped to calm the cacophony.